Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.17 - M6 (Part 2)

In this part, we will continue looking at the climax cue from the score. I will use a mixture of condensed score sheets and excerpts of the full score according to what makes more sense to understand the musical idea.

All the previous parts of this series are available here.

We're looking at the heroic climax part starting at 10:50 in the video.

As always, you can download the score sheet, recording and midi file at the bottom of the post.

Before we start, here are as usual the spotting notes that I had for that sequence:

• 10:49: start ending agony – full heroic and strong emotional feel, sacrifice
• 11:06:04: build to there
• 11:09 – brother theme come in, tender version, emotional, intimate
• 11:21:19 – start toward that grand finale with brother theme, a touch lighter

Bar 14-18:

We're coming from a Eb/G harmony in bar 13 and enter into bar 14 with a C major chord, effectively making use of the V-I cadence of the bass note (in spite of the harmony not really being a V-I). However, with this tonality in 13, the following C major sounds incredibly bright, as it changes the scale material to a considerably brighter key.

Here we have the brass from bar 13-15:

The harmony at this climax moment moves back and forth between C major (bar 14/16) and Abmaj/C (bar15/17). Harmonically speaking, this is one of the heroic scoring clichés. The Ab chord basically is borrowed from C minor so we could call this a harmonic modal interchange.

As this is clearly one if not THE defining moment of the relationship between the two brothers I found it necessary to use the main theme here. It is played by the horns in a slightly different rhythmical shape to fit the 4/4 bar and also harmonically adjusted to the
chord changes. The melodic gesture however is in my opinion clear enough to hear the thematic relation.

From bar 16 onwards the trumpets take over the melody (in harmony) doubled by the Violins and Violas in octaves. The horns fill in some harmonic pulse:

I also used a few fanfaric triple tongues in the brass to support the heroism. I'm also going for a quite rich and colourful harmonic world here, the C major chord has the ninth in the harmony and the Ab is coloured with the "heroic" #11 and major7, making it very bright sounding.

The high woodwinds in bar 14/15 condensed look like this:

Speaking of this texture, I wanted this moment to be quite shimmery and sparkling so I used these very busy woodwind figures to create this texture. They do look way more dramatic than they actually are but are effectively just a sparkling harmonic backdrop. The shimmery quality is also supported by the finger tremoli in the violins that can be seen in the next score excerpt below.

As you might remember from the last part, in the bars before I established a chromatically ascending melodic gesture in the side lines and in order to portray the "lifting" that is happening here, I decided to keep that upwards momentum going.

It can be seen in the violas/celli (below bar 13-16) and is also doubled in clarinet and bass clarinet. The shape of the motif changes a bit compared to the bars before but it keeps raising. However, in order to make it fit better into the harmony, I switched from a chromatic ascension to a diatonic one as continueing the chromatic ascension would have created too much dissonance and it was essential to support the heroisim of this section.

The next important cue lands on the downbeat of bar 19 with the engine falling over. So between bar 14 and this hit point, I needed to fill an odd number of bars. One of the standard solutions is to extend the 4th bar harmonically into the 5th bar which I did here as well. This had the benefit that the anticipation for the resolution in bar 19 gets increased. The Ab/C harmony remains more or less intact in bar 18, with the melody on top moving to an f you could however also see it as a Fm/C but harmonically, I would say these are the same fundamental chords.

Bar 19 lands on a powerful diad of C and G (effecitvely a C powerchord) together with the tipping of the engine. I didn't want this to be a specific minor or major quality, so it is mostly just root notes with a high fifth in the strings.

From a musical standpoint, the following switch was relatively tricky as I needed to get to a soft and emotional version of the brother's theme in a short amount of time. I also would have liked for the movie to take a bit more time to transition to that as this would have made my life a bit easier to get to the new emotional state without feeling like it is instantly switching.

I remember that I tried to not take the intensity of the last chord back that heavily and enter with the theme in a quite defined way but it was very tricky to make that musically plausible. The previous buildup and resolution was so big that it felt like I was just stumbling into the next section. I also tried giving it a beat of rest and entering new which made that emotional switch even harder. So it was quite clear after a while that I need to find a transition to the next section.

The solution I chose now has a hanging high violin note that connects these two sections which is the best solution that I could come up with to connect these two harshly contrasting sections. It's still not the most brilliant transition ever written but after wrapping my head around this for quite some time, I think there is not much that could be done to drastically improve that. It's just in the nature of that particular transition that it feels quite abrupt.

Bar 20-23

In the movie, we see the older brother holding the younger brother in his arms, both injured from the accident. We wanted this to be already a tender resolution of the dramatic events that we just witnessed so the target was to come up with a version of the main theme that would transition into the following buildup:

Melodically speaking, again I adjusted the rhythm of the theme to fit the meter but the intervallic structure is the original idea (other than the adjusted version from a few bars earlier).

I didn't want this statement to feel too definitive so I chose a harmonic approach that is a bit ambivalent. Effectively, I used a pandiatonic approach which allows to break free from traditional chords and treat all notes of a diatonic scale as equally important. Approaching harmony like this will very often create ambiguous chords which also happens here.

In the reduction above, I used chord symbols but you can understand these chords differently. For instance, the chord in 21 is missing the A to be a real F chord, so you could also read it as a C/F. Bar 22 could also be a Cmaj9/G. This ambiguousness also translates into the perception of that sequence. It doesn't feel like it is quite as defined as clear chords would make it. I felt this was necessary here to not take away too much of the big thematic resolution happening later in the scene so this is more like a transitional quality here and feels more harmonically static than like an actual progression.

I used some trills and tremolos in the strings to again create a more shimmery and less defined quality here.